hello everyone. I’m Maria, your friendly local tech reporter and blog editor. Annual OpenSim statistics presentations at the OpenSimulator Community Conference, various attempts to run OpenSim grids on home computers, and compilation of the metaverse and over 1,000 other sites about OpenSim and the very site you are reading now since 2009.
why i started Hypergrid business Because he could see the future, and the future was the metaverse. It is an open source, decentralized, decentralized metaverse. Something like OpenSim hypergrid. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and no one was writing about it. So that would be it.
I still believe in the future of an open source, decentralized, decentralized metaverse. And I think that of all the technologies on the market today, OpenSim hypergrid is still the closest to that vision. I believe the metaverse will change everything. It will change the way we socialize, the way we learn, and the way we work. But that may not happen as quickly as I think.
Metaverse is a technology solution in search of a problem that still needs to be solved. Mostly because the technology is not yet perfected. Headsets make people nauseous. Zoom is sufficient for most virtual meetings. The learning curve of virtual world browsers is too high for the average user. And the killer use case doesn’t exist yet. So far, the only solid non-gaming applications I’ve seen (those that are worth the money and have a learning curve) are about high-end product design. It’s really luxurious. We’re talking about ships, cars and buildings, where globally distributed teams can virtually tour 3D models and talk about design decisions, safety issues, production hurdles and marketing plans. This is a use case where a single immersive meeting can save a company tens of thousands of dollars in travel costs and thousands or even millions of dollars in prototyping costs. Also, meetings are usually short enough and you usually don’t have to move around too much, so people don’t get sick.
But that’s it. The feeling of sharing a location with others is magical. However, they do not compensate for all the shortcomings of desktop-based virtual worlds or 3D virtual environments for most non-gaming applications. That’s right. Desktop-based immersive virtual worlds, also known as first-person shooters, have taken over the gaming world. Yes, Minecraft is really popular. However, it has not yet translated to non-gaming applications on a significant scale.
We’re still waiting for the killer app. We might wait a while. I think things will change once we get a decent interface or better VR hardware. I know the Firestorm team is great, but they’re limited by having to support Second Life, and the OpenSim community is too small to support their own audience. I worry that Second Life has poisoned the well when it comes to general-purpose, user-built virtual environments. That’s because the company did nothing to capitalize on the initial media hype.
The media, myself included, was excited about Second Life’s potential. It became the plot of a TV show and made the cover of Businessweek. I think Linden Lab thought they would just keep giving free publicity forever and never invested in any real marketing, user interface design, or anything else that would make it a viable product in the long run.
Second Life’s concurrency statistics reflected general interest. Over time, data from Grid Survey shows that concurrency numbers have tended to decline.
One notable exception to the downward trend was early 2020. When the pandemic first struck, with people stuck inside their homes, usage surged for the first time in a decade, but has since started to trend back down.
Land area, Second Life’s main source of revenue, also decreased. Total land area, which peaked at 31,988 sites in 2010, has now fallen to 27,630 sites, of which only two-thirds are privately owned and a fifth are abandoned.
OpenSim numbers tend to go in the opposite direction. That said, both land area and active users have been on the rise over the past few years.
In the early days of OpenSim, as you can see in the chart above, a significant portion of its user base was in the non-hypergrid world, primarily InWorldz and Avination. These two grids were shut down, and since then almost all user growth has come from Hypergrid.
In land area the difference is even more dramatic. This is because hypergrid-enabled worlds tend to offer cheap land, and some even offer free land if users can run the area from their home computers.
Of course, it’s difficult to compare OpenSim directly with Second Life.
First of all, Second Life no longer publishes monthly active user counts. The most recent figures are from 2010, when Second Life reported having over 1 million monthly active users. However, historically, Second Life monthly active users averaged 19.8 times the median daily calls. This translates to between 700,000 and 850,000 monthly active users this year.
In comparison, OpenSim’s user base is a drop in the bucket.
On the other hand, OpenSim’s land area is more than three times that of Second Life. This is mainly due to the availability of free and very cheap locations. In fact, the average cost of a standard size area in OpenSim is less than $13 per month.
What I suspect is that people who don’t need Second Life’s large community are looking to OpenSim to get a better deal on the land and more control over their virtual environments.
You can run OSgrid on your own computer to get a free area, use the DreamGrid installer to set up a free OpenSim grid, have a hosting company set up a grid for you, or rent land on an existing grid. . Region owners typically want to keep a copy of their entire region to keep backups, share it with others, or sell it. Grid owners can limit who can visit the grid, lease land, and run their own currencies.
Especially for builders, having an OpenSim grid or region is mandatory. Even if you spend most of your time in Second Life. Building in OpenSim means you can keep the original copy of all your builds in a safe place and work on them with your team. Building in Second Life is more dangerous. Commercial buildings, especially those built by large teams, are more risky due to lack of good backup and ownership issues.
Piracy and copyright are not that big of a problem. Most content theft occurs in Second Life. Because Second Life has most of the content. And most of the stolen content is also distributed to Second Life, which is where most users are. However, in OpenSim, the grid has the power to ban grifters and other users who infringe copyright and block hypergrid teleportation to grids that do not follow the law. Additionally, Kitely Market, the largest platform for selling content, has a robust process for removing infringing content via a “Report Product” button on every individual listing.
The bigger problem is the lack of user base.
For individual users, some find the OpenSim grid more cozy and familiar than the Second Life environment.
However, I believe one of the biggest sources of OpenSim users is the large role-playing groups and communities. By using OpenSim, these groups can set up their own continents or even start their own grids at low cost. They can have more land and more control for a lot less money than they would spend in Second Life.
Another source of OpenSim users are schools, which benefit from having a closed grid that allows for tight control over content and who can access it. However, these grids are private and typically run behind the school firewall, so they do not appear in OpenSim statistics based on public grids.
Outside of school environments, I’ve personally never met a user who came to OpenSim without first experiencing Second Life. This means that OpenSim is influenced by the Second Life diaspora and is inherently limited by Second Life’s technology as well as its dwindling user base.
There is still plenty of room for growth. By better marketing the cost benefits of OpenSim, you can easily increase OpenSim users by 10x or more.
But to go beyond that, OpenSim needs to be able to promote itself to the wider world.
As part of that effort, a few years ago I began covering broader trends in virtual reality. The idea is that people who are interested in virtual reality might also potentially be interested in virtual worlds and look into OpenSim if they visit the site and see that it exists. We also provide free advertising to everyone in the OpenSim community. Whether you sell something on Kitely Market, have a grid where people can rent land, run virtual events, or provide construction or consulting services, you can get free advertising on Hypergrid Business.
This year, we plan to expand the scope of AI application. Some people interested in AI are also interested in virtual environments, and while they’re at it, they’re likely to take a look at OpenSim.
If you’re looking to promote OpenSim to a wider audience, we recommend jumping on the AI bandwagon while interest is high.
For example, you could contribute an article about how to build an AI-based non-player character in OpenSim. Or how to use AI to create a virtual environment in OpenSim. Or how to use AI to generate scripts.
Or, if you already have AI-based NPCs in your grid, you can send me a press release about how to visit your grid and interact with these bots. That reminds me. Here’s how to write a press release using ChatGPT:
And if you want to become a technology reporter or columnist and write about AI, please contact me. Or, if you want to write about events happening in OpenSim or write instructions on how to get started. We will also be launching a YouTube channel for those who would like to be a guest or co-host.
My email is maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Please feel free to contact us.